From Climate Information to Climate Intelligence
How ENGAGEMENT is turning local climate information into actionable insights for Italy's infrastructure and agriculture.
Project Duration: December 2024 – November 2025 (13 months) | Funded by: EU – NextGenerationEU / PNRR | Framework: ICSC Spoke 4 – Earth and Climate (CMCC / CNR)
In May 2023, floodwater swept through Emilia-Romagna. Roads vanished under mud. Farmland drowned overnight. By the time the water receded, 15 people had lost their lives, and the damage bill had crossed eight billion euros. What followed, beyond the grief and the cleanup, was an uncomfortable question: could anyone have seen this coming? Not in the vague sense of "climate change means more flooding," but in hard, localized numbers, this road, this farm, this risk level, this season?
That is exactly the question the ENGAGEMENT project was built to answer.
Figure 1: A flooded area in Molinella, Bologna, in the aftermath of the 2023 Emilia-Romagna floods, the kind of event ENGAGEMENT was built to anticipate and quantify. Source: Wikipedia.
What Is ENGAGEMENT?
ENGAGEMENT stands for EnhaNcinG climAte chanGE inforMation for infrastructurE risks and laNd suitability in iTaly — a mouthful, but the mission behind it is clear: stop telling Italy that the climate is changing, and start showing precisely where, how fast, and what it will cost.
Funded under Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) as part of the National Center for High-Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing (ICSC), the project runs from December 2024 to November 2025. It sits within Spoke 4 Earth and Climate, and is co-coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). Inside Climate Service (ICS) is the sole managing entity and technical lead, designing and implementing the full analytical chain, from high-resolution climate data processing and bias-adjustment, to sector-specific risk modelling and the development of accessible digital tools.
The gap ENGAGEMENT addresses is one that planners, operators, and farmers have felt for years. Global and European climate models produce climate change projections, but at resolutions too coarse to be actionable at the local level. A risk estimate averaged across "central Italy" is nearly useless for a railway manager deciding where to reinforce an embankment, or a cooperative planning next decade's crop mix.
The Science, Made Useful
ENGAGEMENT's first step was to produce very high-resolution climate datasets at roughly 2.2 km grid spacing across Italy, covering historical climatology, seasonal forecasts, and long-term projections out to the end of the century — fine enough to tell apart a coastal highway from an inland one, or a valley vineyard from a hilltop orchard.
But raw resolution is not enough. Climate model outputs carry systematic biases, they need to be corrected and aligned with what has actually been observed on the ground before they can reliably support any impact assessment. Inside Climate Service applied rigorous bias-adjustment and harmonization techniques to do exactly that: producing datasets that are grounded in real Italian climatology while still capturing the climate change signal going forward.
Two Sectors, One Framework
From that data foundation, ENGAGEMENT built two parallel analytical chains, one for infrastructure, one for agriculture, each designed to translate climate variables into numbers that decision-makers can actually act on.
Infrastructure Risk Index
For highways, railways, airports, and high-voltage power lines, ICS structured a hazard–exposure–vulnerability framework. Climate extremes, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, strong winds, were layered over the actual location of each asset type and weighted by social vulnerability indicators. The output is a standardized Climate Risk Index: a comparable, spatially explicit score that shows where stress is highest today and how it shifts under different future scenarios. Not a qualitative warning, a number on a map, ready for infrastructure prioritization and investment planning.
Climate Land Suitability Index
For agriculture, ICS developed empirical crop-climate vulnerability curves, statistically derived relationships between climate variables and expected crop yields — for maize, wheat, rice, soy, grapes, and apples. These curves power a Climate Land Suitability Index: a productivity-based metric that tells a farmer or regional planner not just that conditions are shifting, but by how much output they should expect from a given parcel under each future climate scenario.
Figure 2: Climate risk related to heatwaves for highways in Italy: present conditions (blue line) and future risk conditions calculated using the ENGAGEMENT advanced climate change models and scenarios (red, purple, orange, green, black and grey).
From Research to Real Decisions
A lot of climate science stops at the journal article. ENGAGEMENT was designed to go further. All datasets, indices, and scenario outputs are integrated into the Teal web platform — an interoperable, interactive environment where users can explore historical trends, compare projections across scenarios, and download data for further analysis. No specialist software is required. No translation layer between the science and the decision.
Reliable climate services are not just about modelling power, they depend on rigorous quality control, transparent workflows, and data architecture that hold up to scrutiny. Every step of the ENGAGEMENT pipeline was built to be reproducible and traceable, so outputs can be trusted, audited, and extended over time.
And the framework is built to grow. The same analytical backbone can be extended to additional hazards, new sectors, insurance, water management, coastal planning, and regions beyond Italy. What ENGAGEMENT has produced is not just a set of datasets. It is a repeatable, scalable approach to turning climate data into climate intelligence.
Want to know what climate risk looks like for your infrastructure, your land, or your sector?
Explore ENGAGEMENT and all ICS projects at inclimateservice.com/projects or get in touch directly at info@inclimateservice.com.